I personally don't believe that alcoholism changes our personality or most dominant personality traits, Art. I think it changes how those traits manifest, in what sort of balance, and how we handle them or act in response to this complex of internal drives. These days I think it's more or less generally believed that personality is a combination of inborn factors and others that are the result or learning and experience, and some of the most important parts of the development of this "complex" take place in early life, before most of us ever started to drink. Well of course there is the part that is someone starts to drink or drug heavily very early (including teens years), there is more chance that our basic mechanisms will be altered in a more robust and persistent way... but in this case, I doubt that many of us would be highly aware of what was before, at a very young age, unless we do specific work to tap into that in sobriety. What I think more is that heavy drinking alters how the complex of these features, including character flaws (if you believe in such a classification as "positive" and "negative" traits) penetrate in the form of behaviors.
What prolonged heavy drinking influences very substantially, and usually in quite stubborn ways (so that it takes a while to revert to "normal", whatever that is): our decision making processes and abilities to appropriately and realistically control these in accordance with our true circumstances. One of the most important characteristics of addiction is fundamentally altered decision making, which is based upon biological processes that are becoming increasingly well-known nowadays. Another area that is heavily influenced by addiction, in believe, is our awareness of whoever we are and whatever drives us to do things, which of course has an effect on both our self-perception and, again, our actions and behavior.
Personally, I always think that it can be a little bit dangerous if we entertain the ideas of "addicted person" vs "sober person" as if these were distinct entities inside out. Like, "I will never be that horrible person I was when drinking". I think what we need to do, and usually do in sustained sobriety, is learning to function with a newly acquired balance of our motivations, emotions, desires, whatever... and
use the complex of our personalities in different ways. Of course all this is pretty rough and raw in early sobriety and it can be very challenging to adapt to it and become truly aligned and comfortable with everything. But if we think about it, it can be just the same in response to any major and lasting life change, at least initially.
I think tolerance is definitely a big one, especially given that many of us are quite emotional and irritable in early sobriety. Give it time to find out how to manage it. I think a large part of the challenge is that addiction makes most of us act quite impulsively, and while drinking, we acted out the impulses in getting drunk (and other associated behaviors). How to handle this when suddenly there is nothing to temper us or to occupy our time? It's not an easy change. And, btw, there are also good things in not being so tolerant of BS anymore
